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154 7 Egyptian Colonialism and the Mahdī in the Sudan Historical Themes and Patterns After the collapse of the Funj empire in the early nineteenth century, the lands on the two Niles became one of the few regions in Africa not colonized by a European colonial power but by an Arabo-African empire, Egypt. As in pharaonic times, Egypt sought to secure its southern marches, to control the Nile valley, and to gain access to the natural resources of the Sudan. Egyptian power politics were linked with a program of modernization in Egypt as well as in the new Egyptian provinces in the Sudan. While the Egyptian colonial conquest of the Sudan succeeded, Egyptian efforts to modernize the Sudan remained superficial and created unrest and instability. The new administration , often based on a bureaucracy staffed by Copts, turned social structures upside down, and marginalized established authorities while pampering new social and religious movements, especially among the Sufi orders and religious scholars. The extension of the Egyptian administration into the southern and western marches of the Sudan also threatened established trade networks, in particular when Egypt started to fight against the slave trade in the 1860s. As a result, opposition against the rule of the Turks grew and eventually led to the emergence of a millenarian movement of protest, led by the religious scholar Muh ˙ ammad Ah ˙ mad, who proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi, the “rightly guided” redeemer from Egyptian oppression. In 1885, Egypt had to evacuate the Sudan and the movement of the Mahdi came to power, as possibly the first expression of a modern Sudanese nationalism. Yet the rule of the Mahdiyya proved to be disastrous for the Sudan and its populations, not only due to its inability to overcome ethnic and religious antagonisms, but also due to major failures in its social and economic policies. As a result, the Sudan suffered a devastating human catastrophe in the 1890s and was eventually reconquered by an Egyptian army under British command in 1898. The legacies of both the Egyptian colonization and the Mahdiyya continue to inform politics in the Sudan to this day. Egypt’s Conquest of Sinnār-Funj When Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798 and defeated the Ottoman-Mamlūk army, to take control over Cairo and much of Lower Egypt, the established system of the Mamlūk administration, which had governed Egypt since 1252, collapsed quickly. Although the French soon had to leave Egypt, the Mamlūks were not able to regain Egyptian Colonialism and the Mahdī in the Sudan | 155 lost ground. Eventually an outsider, Muh ˙ ammad ʿAlī, the commander of the small Albanian garrison in Cairo, was able to claim and maintain power with the support of the local elite and religious scholars. Muh ˙ ammad ʿAlī, who was born in 1770 in Kavala (present-day northern Greece), soon outmaneuvered all competitors, not only among the last Mamlūks but also among the local elites, and established his own dynasty. His rule, as recognized by the Ottoman sult ˙ ān in 1805, put Egypt on a course of modernization which eventually turned it into a major economic and military player in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arab peninsula, and northeastern Africa. His rule was linked with efforts to acquire territorial possessions in the form of an empire stretching from the upper Nile to the East African coast and across the Arabian peninsula. In the end, Egypt’s imperial ambitions failed due to European intervention and the financial burden of overambitious projects such as the Suez Canal. Between 1820 and the early 1880s, however, Egypt largely defined the destiny of the Sudan. The foundations of Egypt’s path to modernity were based on a radical policy of reforms in Egypt, initiated by Muh ˙ ammad ʿAlī: the removal of old elites from positions of influence and power, including the religious scholars; the nationalization of the land fiefs of the Mamlūks as well as of all religious endowments in the guise of land titles, and, linked to that, a radical redistribution of land to the peasant farmers, who were constrained, however, to produce cash crops for the state, in particular cotton , which became the backbone of Egypt’s exports and textile production; a number of social and institutional reforms, the establishment of a new system of state schools (Arab. kuttāb), as well as the recruitment of a new army, armed and trained along French models. Based on these instruments of power and fueled by rising income, Muh...

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